Greek Parliament ratifies austerity measures, EURO tanks, USDollar rises, GOLD soars up $24 to $1199, DOW plummets +200

Duncan Niederauer, NYSE Euronext CEO discusses whether error really caused the market plunge today

8:09pm EST: NYSE cancels all trades made between 2:40pm and 3:00pm that were more than 60% off.

Word is after the first really low maybe -off- trade, the computers ran wild with it, Since NYSE has a sort of stopbreaker where they wait maybe 60 seconds to put a trade through if it looks really ‘off’, the trade just moves to the next electronic exchange for a price, the other exchanges do not have the stopbreak so the trades go through, wrong and all. Then the quant models, the buy and sell limits all start kicking in automatically and we get what happened today.

Several respected traders came out this afternoon and said the market is broken, it is too fast. We need the NYSE stopbreak model applied to all electronic exchangs or it will happen again. Duncan Niederhauer cam eon with Maria Bartiromo and explained it well, I will post the video.

SEC and CFTC say they are examing today’s events.

Duncan said tomorrow will probably be ‘ugly’.

3:58pm EST: So a bad trade on PG off by a digit is rumoured to be responsible for the drop from -400 to -998 and back to -400ish. But the Euro plunge, the USDollar rocket, the GOLD surge and the 400ish drop are all fer realsies.

DOW closing down 354 to 10514, those sell programs that ‘kicked in’ saved lots of bacon. But having humans on the floor making the trades would likely have prevented the entire bad order issue in the first place.

3:07pm EST: The 998 drop is an intraday record, now DOW is down 366. I went ahead and pulled the trigger on the LYV buy I have been eyeing. Since I cant beat Ticketmaster I may as well join ;em, the frakkers!!!

2:51PM est: I think the plunge protection team stepped in, suddenly back up to down 650-where are the trading curbs??

2:49 HOLY SHXT, DOW DOWN 956, US DOLLAR SURGING against EURO, FORGET Obamas export plan, PFFT!

2:48om EST: Holy shxt DOW now down 778 and not stopping, this is fear the US will go the way of Greece, we need to STOP SPENDING

2:44pm EST: Above the post update-DOW now down 503 to 10364, GOLD crossed 1200…hang on sloopy!

gold baby

you know what that means….

2:20pm EST: the crowd is pushing closer and closer to the  police line outside Parliament in Athens

…DOW now down 270

2:24pm EST Crowd dispersed into small groups outside Parliament and are now moving into commercial center…

May 6, 2010. Tags: Dow, Economy, EU, Euro, Gold, Greece, Greek Parliament ratifies austerity package, U.S. dollar. Finance, Politics, Wall St. Comments off.